Few persons, however, whom the gods have made critical will care to spend much time _in limine_ over the authorship, [Sidenote: _Quality and contents of the treatise._] the date,[219] the title, and the other beggarly elements in respect to this astonishing treatise. Incomplete as it is—and its incompleteness is as evident as that of the _Poetics_, and probably not much less substantial—difficult as are some of its terms, deprived as we are in some cases of the power of appreciating its citations fully, through our ignorance of their context, puzzled as we may even be now and then by that radical difference in taste and view-point, that “great gulf fixed,” which sometimes, though only sometimes, does interpose itself between modern and ancient,—no student of criticism, hardly one would think any fairly educated and intelligent man, can read a dozen lines of the book without finding himself in a new world, as he compares it with even the best of his earlier critical masters. He is in the presence of a man who has accidentally far greater advantages of field than Aristotle, essentially far more powerful genius, and an intenser appreciation of literature, than Dionysius or Quintilian. And probably the first thought—not of the student, who will be prepared for it, but of the fairly educated man who knows something of Pope and Boileau and the rest of them—will be, “How on earth did this book come to be quoted as an authority by a school like that of the ‘classical’ critics of the seventeenth-eighteenth century, whose every principle almost, whose general opinions certainly, it seems to have been designedly written to crush, conclude, and quell?” Of this more hereafter. Let us begin, as in former important cases, by a short abstract of the actual contents of the book. Footnote 219: Longinus (? 213-273) represents the middle of the _third_ century. Nobody puts it later than this, and nobody earlier than the _first_.